Download or read book Trees of the Celtic Saints written by Andrew Morton and published by Gwasg Carrech Gwalch. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mae Andrew Morton yn y gyfrol hon yn edrych ar nodweddion botanegol coed yw, a sut i'w mesur a'u dyddio; ar goeden yw mewn llenyddiaeth Gristnogol a chyn-Gristnogol, mewn chwedlau, ac ar y berthynas rhwng coed yw a safleoedd Cristnogol hynafol. Ceir manylion am goed yw hynafol yn Defynnog, Gwytherin, Llangernyw, Llanerfyl a Phennant Melangell. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Download or read book The Sacred Tree written by Carole M. Cusack and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fundamental nature of the tree as a symbol for many communities reflects the historical reality that human beings have always interacted with and depended upon trees for their survival. Trees provided one of the earliest forms of shelter, along with caves, and the bounty of trees, nuts, fruits, and berries, gave sustenance to gatherer-hunter populations. This study has concentrated on the tree as sacred and significant for a particular group of societies, living in the ancient and medieval eras in the geographical confines of Europe, and sharing a common Indo-European inheritance, but sacred trees are found throughout the world, in vastly different cultures and historical periods. Sacred trees feature in the religious frameworks of the Ghanaian Akan, Arctic Altaic shamanic communities, and in China and Japan. The power of the sacred tree as a symbol is derived from the fact that trees function as homologues of both human beings and of the cosmos. This study concentrates the tree as axis mundi (hub or centre of the world) and the tree as imago mundi (picture of the world). The Greeks and Romans in the ancient world, and the Irish, Anglo-Saxons, continental Germans and Scandinavians in the medieval world, all understood the power of the tree, and its derivative the pillar, as markers of the centre. Sacred trees and pillars dotted their landscapes, and the territory around them derived its meaning from their presence. Unfamiliar or even hostile lands could be tamed and made meaningful by the erection of a monument that replicated the sacred centre. Such monuments also linked with boundaries, and by extension with law and order, custom and tradition. The sacred tree and pillar as centre symbolized the stability of the cosmos and of society. When the Pagan peoples of Europe adopted Christianity, the sacred trees and pillars, visible signs of the presence of the gods in the landscape, were popular targets for axe-wielding saints and missionaries who desired to force the conversion of the landscape as well as the people. Yet Christianity had its own tree monument, the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, and which came to signify resurrected life and the conquest of eternal death for the devout. As European Pagans were converted to Christianity, their tree and pillar monuments were changed into Christian forms; the great standing crosses of Anglo-Saxon northern England played many of the same roles as Pagan sacred trees and pillars. Irish and Anglo-Saxons Christians often combined the image of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden with Christ on the cross, to produce a Christian version of the tree as imago mundi.

Download or read book Celtic Tree Alphabets written by Nigel Pennick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Provides a full explanation for each character of the Celtic tree alphabets and their historic variants, including each symbol’s corresponding trees, colors, birds, cryptic codes, and esoteric inner meanings • Explores the use of Celtic tree alphabets in spiritual invocation, divination, and symbolic art as well as the practice of Ogham cryptography • Explains how, like Norse Runes, each Ogham character is a meditative symbol in its own right and offers the possibility of deep psychic transformation Emanating from the spiritual traditions of Celtic antiquity, Ogham is best known as a “tree alphabet.” It is a symbolic system that encapsulates the archaic skills and wisdom of ancient Ireland and Britain and is important in contemporary Druidry. Studying the Oghams enables us to engage with ancient ways of thinking and gain access to the elemental powers that speak to the inner nature of our being, the wildwood in our hearts. Presenting a wide-ranging exploration of the Ogham tree alphabet, Nigel Pennick explores the traditional lore of the Celtic trees and their relationship to ancient, mythic beings from whom their understanding was legendarily derived. Each Ogham character is a meditative symbol in its own right, embodying a creative power available to all. Pennick provides a full explanation for each of the Ogham letters along with correspondences from historic Irish sources and considers their use in ciphers, spiritual invocation, divination, and symbolic art. He also discusses ceremonies that assist in reconnecting us with nature and the wilderness, including “Maying” and greenwood marriages and the use of colors and magical binding-knots in the Celtic tradition. Also included is a chapter on the little-known Coelbren y Beirdd, a cryptic system devised for the use of Bards and Druids. This handbook for learning Ogham and Coelbren offers a comprehensive understanding of the ancient Celtic worldview, allowing you to apply their wisdom in modern life.

Download or read book Trees written by Richard Hayman and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Richard Hayman traces the different values and virtues people have seen in trees and forests over the course of history, reflecting the changing use of woodland and the effects of deforestation and urbanization. Tacitus, followed by Romantics and historians of liberty, located freedom in the German forests. Medieval forests were both protected hunting parks and the refuge of Robin Hood. Shakespeare contrasted the simplicity of life in the Forest of Arden with the artificial manners of the court. Since the 18th century, poets such as Wordsworth, Clare, and Hardy have drawn inspiration from trees. How we see trees today will dictate how trees are treated in the future.

Download or read book Tree of Life written by Ray Simpson and published by Harding House Publishing, Incorporated/Anamcharabooks. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like a vast, ever-growing Tree of Life, Divine love expands endlessly throughout the universe. This is the perspective of ancient Celtic spirituality, and it is this concept that Ray Simpson reveals in his poem-prayers.

Download or read book Our Future in Nature written by Edmund Barrow and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who has not felt a sense of awe, silence, stillness, and presence in an ancient woodland or forest or in front of a sacred tree? Humankind has held trees and woodlands in awe and reverence since the dawn of time. We depend on nature for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the services nature provides. This book is about the importance of sacred trees and groves in our stress-filled and increasingly urban world. (Note that over 50 percent of the world is urban.) Sacred trees and sacred groves transcend race, color, and creed. They are found all over our fragile planet. Where there is a tree, there is a sacred tree. This book will appeal to religious and spiritual traditions as well as to conservation and environmental movements. It will offer its reader means to take better care of our only home—planet Earth. Often undervalued, unrecognized, or disrespected, sacred trees and groves are conserved against mind-boggling pressures. For example, there is a sacred fig tree between two shops in one of the main streets in Hanoi, Vietnam. There is also a one-hectare sacred grove in the center of Kumasi, a city of 2.5 million people in Ghana; the over 150,000 sacred groves in India; and the sacred hill forests of every village in Yunnan, South China. Sacred trees and groves often conserve unique biodiversity, which can help create or recreate connectivity in the landscape. As such, sacred trees and groves may be relic survivors of bygone ages and are an important resource for restoring degraded natural landscapes. This book offers ways for those involved with religion and spirituality and for those working with conservation and land use to jointly engage in repairing the damage we have done to Earth.

Download or read book Saints written by Françoise Meltzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

Download or read book Praying with Celtic Saints Prophets Martyrs and Poets written by June Skinner Sawyers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Celtic tradition has taken the modern world by storm. Over the past decade seekers have collected all things Celtic-books, art, music, toys, clothing. But how much of it is authentic or lasting? In this highly distinctive book, June Sawyers has culled from a diverse pool of sources to offer readers a weekly dose of Celtic wisdom and witness. Beyond the famous trio of Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan, contemporary seekers will find kindred souls in famous and not-so-famous saints, prophets, martyrs, and poets who make up the fabric of the Celtic tradition. This book features short entries describing the lives, temptations, insights, and struggles of Celtic saints but also Celtic prophets, martyrs, and poets. Arranged weekly by either feast day, birth date, date of death, or alphabetically, each selection is preceded by a quotation from or about the saint, prophet, martyr, or poet and concludes with a thought to ponder. When appropriate, each entry is accompanied by a descriptive listing ofsignificant sacred sites, museums, or other important landmarks. From Patrick and Columba to Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats, this is a timeless and timely, practical and wise book. Use it as your spiritual guide throughout the year.

Download or read book Celtic Saints of Ireland written by Elizabeth Rees and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most books about Celtic saints are based on their legendary medieval lives. This book, however, is based upon our earliest surviving information: an examination of the sites where these early Christians lived and worked. Archaeology, combined with the study of place names, inscribed stones and early texts, offers us important clues which help us to piece together something of the fascinating world of early Irish Christianity.Elizabeth Rees, an acknowledged authority on Celtic Christianity, has produced this insightful history which is the first in an exciting new series. Illustrated throughout with her own evocative photographs of where these saints resided and worked, the reader is drawn into the beautiful world which these men and women inhabited.

Download or read book Beasts of the Forest written by Jon Hackett and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary engagement with the forest and its monsters through critical readings of folklore, fiction, film, music video and animation. Within the text there are a multitude of convergent critical perspectives used to engage and explore fictional and real monsters of the forest in media and folklore. The collection features chapters from a variety of academic perspectives: film and media studies, cultural studies, queer theory, Tolkien studies, mythology and popular music are featured. Under examination are a wide range of narratives and media forms that represent, reimagine and create the werewolves, witches and weird apparitions that inhabit the forest, along with the forest as a monstrous entity in itself. Whether they be our shelter and safe-haven or the domain of malevolent spirits and sprites, forests have the capacity to horrify and threaten those that venture into them without permission. Human interference has continually threatened forests across the world, yet this threat is reversed in myth, folklore and more recent cultural forms. This collection ranges widely to analyze how forests figure in contemporary culture, as well as the wider contexts in which such representations are inserted.

Download or read book The Ancient Yew written by Robert Bevan-Jones and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gnarled, immutable yew tree is one of the most evocative sights in the British and Irish language, an evergreen impression of immortality, the tree that provides a living botanical link between our own landscapes and those of the distant past. This book tells the extraordinary story of the yew’s role in the landscape through the millennia, and makes a convincing case for the origins of many of the oldest trees, as markers of the holy places founded by Celtic saints in the early medieval ‘Dark Ages’. With wonderful photographic portraits of ancient yews and a gazetteer (with locations) of the oldest yew trees in Britain, the book brings together for the first time all the evidence about the dating, history, archaeology and cultural connections of the yew. Robert Bevan-Jones discusses its history, biology, the origins of its name, the yew berry and its toxicity, its distribution across Britain, means of dating examples, and their association with folklore, with churchyards, abbeys, springs, pre-Reformation wells and as landscape markers. This third edition has an updated introduction with new photographs and corrections to the main text.

Download or read book Warriors of the Word written by Michael Newton and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening illustrated overview of Gaelic culture and history in Scotland. Words have always held great power in the Gaelic traditions of the Scottish Highlands: Bardic poems bought immortality for their subjects; satires threatened to ruin reputations and cause physical injury; clan sagas recounted family origins and struggles for power; incantations invoked blessings and curses. Even in the present, Gaels strive to counteract centuries of misrepresentation of the Highlands as a backwater of barbarism without a valid story of its own to tell. Warriors of the Word offers a broad overview of Scottish Highland culture and history, bringing together rare and previously untranslated primary texts from scattered and obscure sources. Poetry, songs, tales, and proverbs, supplemented by the accounts of insiders and travelers, illuminate traditional ways of life, exploring such topics as folklore, music, dance, literature, social organization, supernatural beliefs, human ecology, ethnic identity, and the role of language. This range of materials allows Scottish Gaeldom to be described on its own terms and to demonstrate its vitality and wealth of renewable cultural resources—making this an essential compendium for scholars, students, and all enthusiasts of Scottish culture.

Download or read book Trees in Literatures and the Arts written by Carmen Concilio and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embracing the intersectional methodological outlook of the environmental humanities, the contributors to this edited collection explore the entanglements of cultures, ecologies, and socio-ethical issues in the roles of trees and their relationships with humans through narratives in literature and art.

Download or read book By Oak Ash Thorn written by Deanna J. Conway and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take one part of the world''''s oldest spiritual system (shamanism), mix in one part of one of the world''''s most popular spiritual cultures (the Celts), and bring it up to date by blending in modern forms of shamanism. The result is one of the most amazing books you''''ll ever use, D. J. Conway''''s "By Oak, Ash, & Thorn. This book is filled with information that can start you on a lifetime of study, practice, and spirituality. First, you''''ll learn about ancient and modern forms of shamanism. You''''ll discover the secrets of the three shamanic worlds, and how you can travel through these mysterious realms. You''''ll be shown how to communicate and deal with the entities and allies you meet there. You''''ll also learn about the tools that a shaman uses. The thing that makes this book unique is that it comes from the viewpoint of Celtic shamanism, and not some generalized form. As a result, the worlds are specifically Celtic in nature. The tools come from Celtic myth and lore. The fifty entities you meet are named and defined as the Faery Folk and their kin from the Bean sidhe (banshee) to the Will o'''' the Wisp (a faery who appears at night in lonely places carrying a lantern to confuse travellers). Almost fifty more animal allies are listed and described. You will also learn the mysteries of the vision quest and how it applies and can be used by Celtic shamans. Before starting your journey you will take a test to determine your strengths and weaknesses as a potential shaman. Other topics include: - Shamanic Healing - Soul Retrieval - Shape-shifting - Invisibility - Divination with stones, the omen stick and the Ogamalphabet - Pathworking through the three shamanic worlds - Different forms of Celtic magic - Herbs This only begins to hint at everything that you can learn from this book. Get your copy today.

Download or read book Celtic Sacred Landscapes written by Nigel Pennick and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to 'show us the holy sites of Britain Ireland and mainland Europe through Celtic eyes', which means that it inevitably takes a somewhat spiritual 'mind body and spirit' tone. That said it offers a fascinating introduction to oral traditions of celtic religion and its ties to the landscape.

Download or read book Celtic Tree Magic written by Danu Forest and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2014-10-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the powerful magic of the twenty-five trees in the ogham tradition. Enrich your spiritual practice with authentic Celtic wisdom and practical techniques. Written by a Druid witch and Celtic shaman, Celtic Tree Magic shows you how to: Practice ogham divination, charms, and spells Work with each tree's magical correspondences and healing attributes Make salves, tinctures, ointments, and green crafts Find tree spirit allies in nature and the otherworld Fashion wands and other magical tools With exercises, hands-on tips, and an accessible exploration of folklore and myth, this lovely and lyrical handbook provides practical skills and deeper understandings for beginners and intermediate practitioners. Praise: "A trusted and guiding hand through the Celtic forests of wisdom and magic."—Kristoffer Hughes, author of The Book of Celtic Magic and founder of the Anglesey Druid Order "This lovely work offers a truly experiential journey...It offers the reader a richer understanding of nature and self."—Philip Carr-Gomm, Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids and author of Druid Mysteries "Danu Forest has made masterful use of the original sources...I heartily commend this book."—Nicholas R. Mann, author of Druid Magic

Download or read book Celtic Tree Mysteries written by Steve Blamires and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: